Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath.
The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has cost him his job and relationship with his wife and stepdaughter. Pulled from the rubble 36 hours after the building’s collapse, he emerges as a local celebrity, offering inspirational talks that he worries are ‘bullshit platitudes to the real sorrowers’.
After debuting in the mid-1970s with a quick succession of autobiographically inspired novels, Price pivoted to screenwriting in the 1980s, with film credits including Sea of Love, Ransom and The Color of Money. He was drawn back to the page to write Clockers (1992), a masterpiece of the crime genre that became a Spike Lee film and inspired the television series The Wire, on which Price worked as a writer.
Clockers was followed by other police procedurals that mapped urban ecosystems such as a fictionalised Jersey City or the Lower East Side, including Freedomland (1999), Samaritan (2003) and Lush Life (2008). Lazarus Man is the first novel published under Price’s name since Lush Life.
The book bites off another chunk of the Big Apple – this time animating Harlem, where Price has lived since 2008, when the book is set. Raised in the ethnically diverse projects in the Bronx, he has long used detective fiction as a springboard for exploring social issues around drugs, policing and race. His characters are often trapped by their choices or circumstances. Here Anthony’s entrapment is made manifest under the rubble. Biracial with middle-class professional parents, he refuses the easy way out of blaming his mistakes – starting with getting kicked out of an Ivy League university for dealing drugs – on racism.
A cinematic novelist, Price is justly admired for his dialogue and first-degree research, which he refers to as ‘hanging out’. Like Felix, he enjoys ‘hunting for moments’. The stamp of the screen is indelibly imprinted on Lazarus Man, which frequently jump-cuts between scenes, introducing a wider cast of secondary characters that can be hard to follow. Ultimately, it’s an atmospheric novel with the trappings of crime fiction.
Despite the presence of a detective and a missing person, the novel does not follow the procedural format of alternating chapters between cops and suspects. The collapse, we learn early, is not a result of foul play or Grenfell-like negligence but the impact of the vibrations from a subway extension on the old building. Mary’s character is endearing, and Royal’s hustle offers gallows humour, but the storylines of the main characters plod along to rather anticlimactic ends, with the reveal so heavily foreshadowed that it’s met with a shrug.
‘The thing about a crime novel,’ Price once told Claire Messud in conversation, ‘is that it’s got to have a revelation. And I hate revelations. And I hate answers, because life is open-ended.’ True enough; but we turn to detective fiction for a respite – however brief – of it seeming otherwise.
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